Life Crisis: the Mindful Way
Free Sample
Chapter 1 Transforming Crisis
Trieste, Italy
The soup starts gently lurching from side to side in our bowls, as it would on an ocean liner rolling and pitching on the high waves. But we’re not at sea. My little brother points at the ceiling. ‘Look!’ he shouts. The light hanging over the dining table is swaying slowly, eerily, from side to side. There’s a strange, distant rumbling. My father dashes out to investigate, thinking maybe the central heating is exploding. Then it’s over.
It was 6 May 1976 and an earthquake had just devastated Friuli in northeast Italy. What we felt in our home, some 60 miles away in Trieste, on what was then the Yugoslavian border, measured (at its epicentre) 6.5 on the Richter scale. It left nearly a thousand dead and 157,000 homeless.
We are bombarded daily by images of similar disasters. As I write, forest res have swept across parts of parched Europe, destroying homes and habitats. Texas has just been ravaged by storms and flooding. The war in Syria claims civilian after civilian.
Things happen
These catastrophes are examples of what we might call ‘primary suffering’. Things happen in life over which we have no control: we lose a loved one, we lose our livelihood, our relationship or our health breaks down. This is primary suffering. It is universal. A fact of life. Illness, old age and death are facts of life. Primary suffering is in evitable. Take a pause, take a moment to breathe into that truth. We need to meet it with love and compassion, with tenderness.
The problem is this though: we argue with life. We argue with the facts. We fight and resist, we kick and scream, we try to shore up our lives against it. We don’t want our beloved to walk out on us; we don’t want the grief of a miscarriage; we don’t want to have to make decisions about turning off a life support machine. As Byron Katie, author and spiritual teacher, says, if we argue with reality we will lose, but only 100 per cent of the time. That hurts. Fighting with reality is painful. Resisting the in evitable brings a different kind of suffering, a more painful kind. This is what we might call ‘secondary suffering’.
The good news is that we don’t have to fight reality. There is a different way of doing things that hurts a lot less. While we can do precious little about primary suffering, about the things that just happen to us in life, we can do everything about secondary suffering. We can respond in ways that alleviate rather than exacerbate our suffering. How do we do that? Through mindfulness. Using this ancient wisdom we can find steadiness in the midst of our life’s earthquake.
Everyone’s crisis
This book is for everyone. For everyone living in the twenty rst century. Crisis is universal. It comes to all of us at some time, in some guise. Right now, because of the inter dependent world in which we live, we are all experiencing crisis of global proportions. Our climate, our refugees, our terrorism and our economic wellbeing are all interrelated, inextricably and irrevocably woven together.
We know in our hearts that families in Syria are no different from our family. That is why the Syrian war impacts on us. When Texas experiences flooding we remember how hard local communities closer to home were hit by our own floods, whatever their scale. When locals and tourists are mown down in Nice or Barcelona, we remember terrorist incidents in our own country. Their crisis is our crisis.
I call this international state of emergency ‘the dark night of the globe’. It is a collapse in systems, ecological, socioeconomic and political. In terms of the dynamics of the process, the breakdown that holds the potential for breakthrough, it is comparable to the kind of crisis some one going through a mental breakdown or dark night of the soul experiences. (In my book Coping with a Mental Health Crisis, I explore in detail how every breakdown holds the potential for healing and growth.)
As the ice caps melt into the ocean, the same ocean that the Fukushima reactor continues to pour radio- activity into, we know that we ourselves have caused many of these disasters. Even the ones we think of as ‘natural’, like earthquakes. Petroleum and water, left untouched in the earth’s crust, help to lubricate and smooth the shifting of tectonic plates. As we continue to extract more and more such materials through wells, leaving natural reserves depleted, we only exacerbate the incidence of earthquakes.
Turning towards the painful
Global crisis has a different impact on each of us. Either we turn and look the other way – keeping ourselves busy in our denial with all the trappings of life: kids, job, mort- gage – or we freeze in fear, overwhelmed by feelings of powerlessness, of lack of control. Alternatively, we seek to numb ourselves and our feelings through umpteen addictions, from outright dependency on alcohol or drugs (including prescribed ones) to overworking, overconsuming, or even over-talking.
Global crisis is the primary suffering. It is a fact. The myriad ways in which we run, hide from, dodge and deny this reality are the secondary suffering. As hard as we might try to ignore it, as hard as we might try to busy ourselves with everyday life, there is no denying the reality of our collective situation. We cannot pretend any longer it is not happening. We can no longer ignore it.
There comes a point when a person with terminal cancer can no longer truly deny she is going to die, can no longer pretend her life is not coming to an end. If and when that person is ready, she turns and faces what she has been running away from.
This is the crux of mindfulness: we turn and face that which is painful, terrifying, full of grief, and we do so with kindness, with compassion, with all the self-regard and self-love we can muster. Then, as Stephen Levine attests in A Year to Live, his excellent work on death and dying, everything changes. The secondary suffering melts away.
So whether you’re feeling the international crisis, or whether the earthquake is more in the day-to-day events of your life, know the difference between primary and secondary suffering. Name that over which you have no control. Then name that over which you do have control. It is in the second where there is hope, where your work is, where transformation will occur.
Trieste, Italy
The soup starts gently lurching from side to side in our bowls, as it would on an ocean liner rolling and pitching on the high waves. But we’re not at sea. My little brother points at the ceiling. ‘Look!’ he shouts. The light hanging over the dining table is swaying slowly, eerily, from side to side. There’s a strange, distant rumbling. My father dashes out to investigate, thinking maybe the central heating is exploding. Then it’s over.
It was 6 May 1976 and an earthquake had just devastated Friuli in northeast Italy. What we felt in our home, some 60 miles away in Trieste, on what was then the Yugoslavian border, measured (at its epicentre) 6.5 on the Richter scale. It left nearly a thousand dead and 157,000 homeless.
We are bombarded daily by images of similar disasters. As I write, forest res have swept across parts of parched Europe, destroying homes and habitats. Texas has just been ravaged by storms and flooding. The war in Syria claims civilian after civilian.
Things happen
These catastrophes are examples of what we might call ‘primary suffering’. Things happen in life over which we have no control: we lose a loved one, we lose our livelihood, our relationship or our health breaks down. This is primary suffering. It is universal. A fact of life. Illness, old age and death are facts of life. Primary suffering is in evitable. Take a pause, take a moment to breathe into that truth. We need to meet it with love and compassion, with tenderness.
The problem is this though: we argue with life. We argue with the facts. We fight and resist, we kick and scream, we try to shore up our lives against it. We don’t want our beloved to walk out on us; we don’t want the grief of a miscarriage; we don’t want to have to make decisions about turning off a life support machine. As Byron Katie, author and spiritual teacher, says, if we argue with reality we will lose, but only 100 per cent of the time. That hurts. Fighting with reality is painful. Resisting the in evitable brings a different kind of suffering, a more painful kind. This is what we might call ‘secondary suffering’.
The good news is that we don’t have to fight reality. There is a different way of doing things that hurts a lot less. While we can do precious little about primary suffering, about the things that just happen to us in life, we can do everything about secondary suffering. We can respond in ways that alleviate rather than exacerbate our suffering. How do we do that? Through mindfulness. Using this ancient wisdom we can find steadiness in the midst of our life’s earthquake.
Everyone’s crisis
This book is for everyone. For everyone living in the twenty rst century. Crisis is universal. It comes to all of us at some time, in some guise. Right now, because of the inter dependent world in which we live, we are all experiencing crisis of global proportions. Our climate, our refugees, our terrorism and our economic wellbeing are all interrelated, inextricably and irrevocably woven together.
We know in our hearts that families in Syria are no different from our family. That is why the Syrian war impacts on us. When Texas experiences flooding we remember how hard local communities closer to home were hit by our own floods, whatever their scale. When locals and tourists are mown down in Nice or Barcelona, we remember terrorist incidents in our own country. Their crisis is our crisis.
I call this international state of emergency ‘the dark night of the globe’. It is a collapse in systems, ecological, socioeconomic and political. In terms of the dynamics of the process, the breakdown that holds the potential for breakthrough, it is comparable to the kind of crisis some one going through a mental breakdown or dark night of the soul experiences. (In my book Coping with a Mental Health Crisis, I explore in detail how every breakdown holds the potential for healing and growth.)
As the ice caps melt into the ocean, the same ocean that the Fukushima reactor continues to pour radio- activity into, we know that we ourselves have caused many of these disasters. Even the ones we think of as ‘natural’, like earthquakes. Petroleum and water, left untouched in the earth’s crust, help to lubricate and smooth the shifting of tectonic plates. As we continue to extract more and more such materials through wells, leaving natural reserves depleted, we only exacerbate the incidence of earthquakes.
Turning towards the painful
Global crisis has a different impact on each of us. Either we turn and look the other way – keeping ourselves busy in our denial with all the trappings of life: kids, job, mort- gage – or we freeze in fear, overwhelmed by feelings of powerlessness, of lack of control. Alternatively, we seek to numb ourselves and our feelings through umpteen addictions, from outright dependency on alcohol or drugs (including prescribed ones) to overworking, overconsuming, or even over-talking.
Global crisis is the primary suffering. It is a fact. The myriad ways in which we run, hide from, dodge and deny this reality are the secondary suffering. As hard as we might try to ignore it, as hard as we might try to busy ourselves with everyday life, there is no denying the reality of our collective situation. We cannot pretend any longer it is not happening. We can no longer ignore it.
There comes a point when a person with terminal cancer can no longer truly deny she is going to die, can no longer pretend her life is not coming to an end. If and when that person is ready, she turns and faces what she has been running away from.
This is the crux of mindfulness: we turn and face that which is painful, terrifying, full of grief, and we do so with kindness, with compassion, with all the self-regard and self-love we can muster. Then, as Stephen Levine attests in A Year to Live, his excellent work on death and dying, everything changes. The secondary suffering melts away.
So whether you’re feeling the international crisis, or whether the earthquake is more in the day-to-day events of your life, know the difference between primary and secondary suffering. Name that over which you have no control. Then name that over which you do have control. It is in the second where there is hope, where your work is, where transformation will occur.